Meta's new business terms and your website: a guide

If you run a Facebook Page or an Instagram business account, or you advertise with Meta, you may have seen a notice about updated terms. They were due to start on 30 October 2026. Meta has now moved the date to 20 November 2026.

The part getting attention is about websites. Here is what is going on, why some publishers are angry, and what a small business should actually do.

What changed and when

Meta told Reuters on 23 October that its updated Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms would start on 20 November instead of 30 October, to give it more time to explain the changes to partners (Reuters via WMBD, 23 Oct 2026).

According to PPC Land, the Commercial Terms are accepted by every business that advertises or runs a page on Facebook and Instagram. The new wording lets Meta use automated tools to access, index, cache and crawl web addresses associated with your products or services, for "advertising and business products" (PPC Land, 23 Oct 2026).

Why publishers are unhappy

News publishers and advertisers complained to competition regulators in the EU and the UK. They argue the wording is broad enough to cover a whole website and to feed Meta's AI products.

Meta rejects that reading. PPC Land reports that a separate sentence allowing Meta to use content from these sites to train AI had been removed from the UK preview of the terms by 23 October. A Meta spokesperson said site owners can still use robots.txt to signal their preferences. Critics point out that the terms themselves do not mention robots.txt, and do not say whether a robots.txt setting limits what a business agrees to (Search Engine Journal, 26 Oct 2026).

The European Commission said it welcomed the delay. Search Engine Journal reports that no regulator ordered the delay or any change, and that the crawling permission is still in both sets of terms.

Our take for small businesses

For a news publisher, its articles are the product, so being crawled is a big deal. For a plumber, a salon or a sari-sari store, the picture is different. Most small businesses want their prices, services and opening hours read and shown in as many places as possible.

So the real question is not "should I panic?" It is "do I know what I am allowing, and can I change it?" The answer to the second part is, at least partly, a small file on your website called robots.txt.

The one mistake to avoid

Meta publishes a list of its crawlers (Meta for Developers). The important ones for you are:

• FacebookExternalHit fetches the title, description and picture when someone shares your link on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
• Meta-ExternalAds crawls to improve advertising and other business products.
• Meta-ExternalAgent crawls to train AI models or to improve products by indexing content.
• Meta-WebIndexer reads pages to improve Meta AI search results, so it can cite and link to them.

If you block everything from Meta in a panic, you may also block FacebookExternalHit. Then your links can appear on Facebook with no picture and no title, which makes every share of your website look broken. Meta also says this crawler might skip robots.txt for security checks, such as scanning for malware.

What to do before 20 November

1. Read the notice. Read the terms notice Meta sent you in your business tools. Our summary is based on press reports, and the final wording could still change.

2. Decide what you are comfortable with. If your site is just your services and contact details, being read by Meta's ad and search crawlers may help people find you. If you publish original work you sell, such as recipes, guides or photos, you may want to be stricter.

3. Check your robots.txt. Visit yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. If you want to block Meta's AI crawler but keep link previews, block only Meta-ExternalAgent and leave FacebookExternalHit alone. Ask whoever runs your website if you are unsure.

4. Test a share. After any change, paste your link into Meta's Sharing Debugger to check the picture and title still appear.

5. Keep a note. Write down the date you accepted or changed anything. If the terms change again, you will know where you stood.

The short version

Meta's new business terms start on 20 November 2026 and include permission to crawl web pages linked to your business. For most small firms, the sensible move is not to block Meta entirely, but to choose which crawlers you allow and to keep link previews working.

If you are on Moon Websites and want a hand with your robots.txt, message a real person through the chat on our website.